NASA chief scientist weighs in
Americans are "under siege" from disinformation designed to confuse the public about the threat of climate change, Nasa's former chief scientist has said.
Speaking to the Guardian, Ellen Stofan, who left the US space agency in December, said that a constant barrage of half-truths had left many Americans oblivious to the potentially dire consequences of continued carbon emissions, despite the science being unequivocal.
"We are under siege by fake information that's being put forward by people who have a profit motive," she said, citing oil and coal companies as culprits. "Fake news is so harmful because once people take on a concept it's very hard to dislodge it."
During the past six months, the US science community has woken up to this threat, according to Stofan, and responded by ratcheting up efforts to communicate with the public at the grassroots level as well as in the mainstream press.
"The harder part is this active disinformation campaign," she said before her appearance at Cheltenham Science Festival this week. "I'm always wondering if these people honestly believe the nonsense they put forward. When they say 'It could be volcanoes' or 'the climate always changes'... to obfuscate and to confuse people, it frankly makes me angry."
Stofan added that while "fake news" is frequently characterised as a problem in the right-leaning media, she saw evidence of an "erosion of people's ability to scrutinise information" across the political spectrum. "All of us have a responsibility," she said. "There's this attitude of 'I read it on the internet therefore it must be true'."
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @04:29PM
More insanity from the clueless department!
"People don't just hand resources to wealthy individuals; it must be maintained."
Once you get rich enough you can invest your money in pretty safe stuff and hire people to run everything. All the rich person has to do is make sure there bank balance matches reality close enough so they can catch embezzlement.
#2: you're just a bigot who likes imagining that science has validated your bigotry. There have been plenty of smart people who fucked up and plenty of dumb people who have made the world a better place. Wisdom and intelligence are not always correlated. It doesn't take a genius to choose how to live, or how to set up government. Example: the current idiots trying to run things. Get your perversion of Natural Selection out of here! Go back to your basement and measure the brain capacities of dead people with some walnuts or something.